About Me

I'm just me - a solitary wanderer who trekked across much of the world and recently retired to a small farm in the Ozarks.
My checkered past includes time spent as an Army officer, high school teacher and principal, real estate broker, child protection worker and administrator, and social worker with the U.S. military.
Over the years I have resided in a variety of places including Missouri, Virginia, Okinawa, Kansas, Kentucky, and Arizona. I have also traveled to Germany, Mexico, Canada, Russia, Sweden, Great Britain, Belize, Guatemala, Taiwan, Guam, South Korea, Vietnam, and numerous islands in the Caribbean - including Cuba.
I have ridden in a Russian ambulance, hitch-hiked across Moscow late at night, fought an ostrich, celebrated New Year's at a street party in Hanoi, and bicycled across the Caribbean. My travels have taken me to Ground Zero in Hiroshima, the Bolshoi Ballet, China Beach, and the White House kitchen.
The nine things in life that I am most proud of are my children: Nick, Molly, and Tim, and my grandchildren: Boone, Sebastian, Judah, Olive, Willow, and Sullivan.
Life has been very good to me indeed!

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Paul Ryan, Class Warrior

by Pa RockCitizen Journalist

Some Americans who were fortunate enough to have been born on the moneyed side of America's great economic chasm are nevertheless able to harbor some empathy for those who were not as lucky in life's initial lottery. There are, in this country, some angels with means who spend their lives looking for ways to lift others out of the wretchedness of poverty. House Speaker Paul Ryan, alas, is not one of those good souls.

Ryan, the son of a physician, never took his economic comfort for granted. As a rising star among Republican politicians, his focus has always been on taking care of the privileged while constatnly being on the lookout for ways to increase the class divide and insure that America's poor stay that way.

An opinion piece in today's New York Times by columnist David Leonhardt illuminates the fact that there will be a great deal of savings to the government in the new health care bill that is largely the handiwork of Ryan and his minions. The money will be generated by higher premium costs to individuals between the ages of sixty and sixty-four, a lowering of services to certain categories of patients including disabled people, hepatitis patients, and opioid addicts - and, of course, the elimination of many low income families from the program who would be unable to afford coverage without government supplements.

That would be a tidy bundle of "savings," and it would achieve a major part of Ryan's real agenda by screwing the infirm and the poor. But a true class warrior like Paul Ryan wants more than just sticking it to the poor. He also wants to reward the rich for . . . well . . . for being rich. Ryan's greedy-assed "health care" scheme would reinvest those savings into America by doling them out as tax breaks to households making over $700,000 a year - and most would go to households making millions of dollars per year.

Why with savings like that, the DeVos family alone would be able to bring in an additional stable of politicians to do their bidding, and Trump could open another university to take advantage of educate the breeze-brains who graduated from Betsy's school choice programs. It's a win, win, win - with all of God's true children making money. Thank you, Paul Ryan.

David Leonardt said in his column today that a reporter had asked Paul Ryan at a press conference why the new medical plan would cut taxes for the rich. Ryan's response, according to Leonhardt, was to laugh, wave the question away, and tell the reported to read the bill - or, as the columnist so succinctly put it, Ryan "can't defend the tax cut."

Yeah, that would be a tough one alright. Explaining how giving a tax break to the rich does anything to alleviate America's burgeoning medical crisis.

Paul Ryan's new plan to address America's health care crisis while lining the pockets of people who don't need the money is opposed by AARP, the American Medical Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and a host of hospital organizations and associations. But hey, those groups can't possibly know as much about health care reform as a room full of greedy politicians - right?

Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump do not speak for America - they speak for themselves and their friends. This is class warfare at its ugliest, and right now the good guys are battling for their very lives - and they are about to do it without insurance.

4 comments:

Congress and the President, upon passage and enactment of Trumpcare should also give up their government subsidized healthcare. A prediction I read was that Trumpcare will be like Trump University, except you die as a result.

Why is it that I think the three men mentioned at the end are all evil? Seems to be a fairly universal assessment among many millions of America. But they're in power, and they're not going to take this opportunity for granted.